Hello World














I'm in Korea, which is a little random and so I thought I'd tell you all about it. The following will be a mashup of my journey here and my take on Korean culture and society based solely on opinion and intuition. I actually wrote an introductionary post whilst flying sky high over china, but time has passed since then and it's largely irrelevent now. In short it just said the previous in a drawn out way, and detailed my struggles of trying to get to the toilet without awaking the sleeping beauty to my side.

My challenge for you today, is to ask someI challenge you to ask a friend, or yourself, something they know about Korea. If you're lucky you may get a response of something about North Korea's nuclear weapons, and a special few may recognise the brands Samsung and LG admist the umms and uhhs.

The truth is, people outside of this area, don't really know much about Korea. knows anything about Korea outside of this area. This is of course, a huge generalisation and laregely untrue, but my point remains that in the western world many people don't even know where it is, let alone anything about it. It would be nice to say that this curiosity is the reason I have ended up here, and although it did excite me the closer I got to my departure its largely untrue. I'm in Korea because I stumbled across a stand in an international fare (whilst looking for ways to get to Japan), wrote down my email address on a form, filled out an application and hey presto!

Koreans must have really damanged feet and devastated livers. Either that or they've developed a resiliance through the years of abuse. I am well aware females worldwide enjoy shoes, but here there is an unhealthy abundance of them in particular high heels. In general Koreans dress well. Although there is a big interest in fashion, the consistency in dress seems not so much that they're trying to impress but simply would rather not face the social consequences of leaving the house sans makeup in a tracksuit and trainers.

In Seoul at least, like many places around the world, there doesn't seem to be a trace of the traditional dress left in modern fashion. Nevertheless they've managned to bring together an eclectic mix of funky Japanese and idolised western and conservative fashion in a distinctly Korean way.

After sitting down in the restaurant in occured to me that we had no means to order food. Simply pointing at the menu resolved this issue.
After a short while, a variety of things ended up on our table.
She watched in amusement as we picked at little things, not sure what was what. Eventually, it was all too much and she came over and started mixing our food for us. I felt like a baby.
My first

I wanted to write that, despite korea being the most homogenous country in the world. I didn't get the stares nearly as much as indonesia.